That's definitely true. That should still not take away from the accomplishments of the SpaceX engineers. ULA had the same exact opportunities but completely wasted them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Oh sorry yeah that was poorly worded. I don't mean to say that SpaceX engineers are failures, what they've accomplished is nothing short of incredible. But failure is an inevitable part of the engineering process of iterating and improving your solution. NASA doesn't have the luxury of quick iteration cycles like SpaceX does (comparatively), because each iteration means more money out of the taxpayers' pockets.